At the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), we worked together to implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessibility standards in an asynchronous online course, Visual Literacy, and face to face courses where questions of the body and disability were central. While we collaborated on pedagogy for years before the COVID-19 pandemic, our course design elements and best practices were rolled out on an emergency basis to the Film and Media Studies (FMS) interdisciplinary program when COVID-19 shut down most in-person learning at Pitt through August 2021. The abrupt implementation of broader remote teaching highlighted core challenges to accessibility and equity, but it also afforded opportunities to expand our practice of media engagement and making skills into a variety of critical studies courses, especially because inviting students to choose basic media production assignments was successful in our dedicated online course.

When the full FMS program moved online and after ensuring that all courses met basic standards for accessibility, we instructed faculty on how to apply UDL in terms of interface and course structure as well as individual content and assignment elements. Rather than flattening all dis/abilities or making differences invisible, UDL provided a predictable interface from which instructors would then be encouraged to implement our recommendations for increasing student choice towards a more equitable pedagogy.

We are not suggesting that UDL is a simple solution to the complexities of access and inclusion for film and media pedagogy. In Restricted Access (2016), Elizabeth Ellcessor argues that technology advertisements twenty years apart in their creation appeal to “eliminationist” rhetoric regarding disability and difference: on the internet, via telecom giants (and now it would seem the Metaverse), there will be no disability.[1] Now, given the internet’s pervasiveness and the promise of technologies for education, the same might be said in a different way for UDL—it doesn’t matter to UDL who “you” are. Once you see the ableism of such eliminationism, you can’t unsee it. However, this is not the necessary conclusion of applications of both UDL and student choice in assignment completion. Indeed, in our asynchronous course, it would first matter who “you” are: the class was designed and offered through the College of General Studies—a school made up of primarily nontraditional adult learners and those pursuing continuing education with a focus on professionalization—before later being offered to students pursuing a degree in four years.

Our pandemic recommendations came directly from our experiences teaching this asynchronous Visual Literacy course. Because we designed the course originally for “nontraditional” students,[2] inclusion, access, and sensitivities to the differing lived experiences of our students guided our curricular considerations not only in relation to traditional/nontraditional student status (of course, in practice, both traditional and nontraditional students have always enrolled in the class), but also age, disability, race, class, English Language Learners (ELL), and other very specific considerations such as technology availability, proficiency with technology, and time constraints for working parents or adults with a full-time job. Rather than a flattening of difference or an address to an “any you whatsoever,” an asynchronous remote course ideally requires an expansion of the instructor and student imagination of who constitutes the “we” of the course: since we don’t see one another, it is crucial that the imagination of ourselves (and specifically the invocation of ourselves via format and assignment design) is vast.

Equity Lessons from Asynchronous Design

While “student choice” can often refer to collaborative syllabus design where the students choose the texts to study, this is not how we approach the concept in relation to UDL. The asynchronous online nature of the course in question created barriers to a collaborative negotiation of a syllabus both in terms of physical space and shared social time. Additionally, we were unwilling to sacrifice the deliberate interconnection of assignments and the nuancing of concepts across the four units of the main course, especially in terms of decentering whiteness at a primarily white institution (PWI). Course-long questions, such as those around semiotics, race, in-group and out-group reading strategies, and audience, require instructor expertise and thoughtful negotiation with student experience.

Instead, we begin by developing a predictable interface within our Learning Management System (LMS, presently Canvas) by grouping concepts into meaningful sets for modules. Modules are then grouped into units. Within modules we provide opportunities for student choice for assignment completion to demonstrate breadth and, at the end of units, depth. We use Specifications (SPECS) grading, through which students are empowered to choose a grade track where they can omit a set number of assignments of their determination.[3] For one short module assignment, we might offer four embedded film clips which students can choose to discuss or annotate, featuring a variety of markers of race, class, gender, and age.

Figure 1. This sample assignment on the female gaze asks students to work with short clips from multiple women directors across decades, genre, and film form. Students choose what type of assignment to create as well as whether to work with one or multiple films as they advance their understanding of the gaze across assignments in the module with a lecture and a reading by bell hooks. Films clockwise from top right: Thriller (Sally Potter, 1979), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991), and Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997).

For another module assignment we might offer a variety of ways that a student can respond to assigned material (for example, voice memo, video essays, presentations with screenshots, alphabetic essays). Finally, larger unit projects create a space for autonomy in both dimensions: students can rethink an existing assignment into another media form of their choosing, can choose between a critical or creative option (such as choosing to write a traditional paper on iconography in genre films or choosing to use editing software to change the genre of an existing film trailer through music, font, and transitions), or can bring in a relevant media text of their own choosing to create a video essay on, for example, how the male gaze works in music videos or video games. The assignment prompt in the latter case keeps the focus on a decolonizing approach, though the students can themselves choose their music video examples from their own taste or subculture. In this way, choice empowers the student to translate the work into the media of their own desire while still ensuring a larger investment in the culturally nuanced approaches to the material so essential to the course design.

Evaluation Considerations:

• Early assignments value skills acquisition as scaffolding for tool use, enabling future choice by building competence and comfort with non-alphabetic text options.
• Stakes vary, and low stakes assignments explicitly value reflection by the student on their own creative work.
• Assignments are all graded satisfactory/no credit (following SPECS practices), reflecting that content comprehension and basic skills are more important than “mastery,” which is crucial to a widely inclusive imagination of student experiences and time constraints.
• Low stakes and higher stakes assignments include choice from among short media objects to demonstrate analytical competency and application of readings.
• Assignments vary between peer-facing and instructor-facing. Especially where communications are not monitored full-time, assignments being visible only to instructors prevent marginalized students from bearing the burden of instructing peers at a PWI.[4]
• Predictable design provides students with large and small opportunities to venture into realms of critical making or praxis that otherwise feel riskier to them.

Faculty Considerations:

While introducing these ideas to the larger faculty (tenure track, non-tenure track, adjunct, grad students), we recommended changes across numerous courses and stressed how instructors should consider using the LMS to create not only a predictable course design but also a common programmatic experience across all the FMS courses. When colleagues resisted, we found this resistance to be associated with concerns for instructor autonomy. However, faculty concerns over loss of autonomy and individuality do not outweigh student needs like planning, organizing, and self-monitoring, all of which can be supported by the use of a shared LMS interface.

Over the past two years, faculty have developed individualized systems of substitutions by which students can complete assignments or requirements in alternate ways that are legible, predictable, and reflective of course objectives for online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses. For example, students may choose to opt into critical making assignments. In practice, we have found that students regardless of major at our STEM-focused university are able to meet and exceed expectations for engagement in critical concepts, media creation, and media analysis when provided with the opportunity to choose how to engage. Indeed, this ability to substitute how to complete assignments (through alphabetic, audio, or video submissions) is what we feel is essential to build into pedagogies for equity and inclusion.

Conclusions?

The experience of designing and implementing UDL before and during the pandemic has led us to conclude that it is far easier to strive for an ethos in course development than to retrofit for universality, though a thoughtful redesign can incorporate Specifications grading and student choice fully or in a hybrid mode to enhance access in terms of disability accommodations, illness, and a wide variety of learning styles and experiential realities. Acutely aware that the labor required to adapt to these recommendations is not shared evenly given our own positioning as NTT teaching faculty with higher course loads, we provided templates for all faculty and support for non-tenure stream and part-time faculty, including graduate students. At minimum, the majority of our faculty members have adopted closed captioning for all media as well as consistent formatting for course documents and LMS. Maximally, pandemic education and our program’s rapid remote adaptation invited considerations of a more just pedagogy that created the conditions for students to experience more choice in the way that they complete their assignments and to control their own level of participation, to have room to experiment more with mode of production within Specification grading, and to pursue their own interests through self-designed larger projects.

1. Elizabeth Ellcessor, Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation (New York: New York University Press, 2016). ↑

2. The University of Pittsburgh is a traditional R1 with a student population comprised of mainly 18-22 year old students who live in campus housing or nearby neighborhoods. CGS advertises itself as primarily serving an alternate population that they term nontraditional students (see “CGS Student Government Dinner for Non-Traditional Students” and their flagship “McCarl Center for Non-Traditional Student Success”), including adult learners, students who had previously attended two year colleges, returning students, and veterans. ↑

3. Claudia J. Stanny and Linda B. Nilson, Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time (Bloomfield: Stylus Publishing, 2014). ↑

4. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). ↑